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The H Roundup 2012 - January to April

As the end of the year approaches, The H's weekly roundup expands its scope and looks back, month by month at 2012, sharing the most read stories and features for each of those months. In this first part, we look at January to April...

January

The year started with Anonymous's latest denial of service weapon turning out to be JavaScript hidden in pages set to perform denial of service, the return of the 6502 processor, the promotion of Linux version 3.0 to long term support, a root exploit in the Linux kernel and the release of an NSA security-enhanced Android.

The month also saw the release of Linux 3.2 which, as is traditional on The H, was covered in depth by Thorsten Leemhuis in a feature article while Richard Hillesley did a "health check" for The H on the up-and-coming Linux Mint project and distribution.

February

February saw the arrival of the second alpha for the keenly awaited long term support version 12.04 of Ubuntu. Adobe pulled the rug from under Flash on Linux with only Google Chrome getting future Flash versions, power was saved on Linux running systems with the latest kernel fixes, a Perl-based data system acquired automatic parallel processing and the first beta for GNOME 3.4 arrived

Featured articles in February included a look at how open source hardware could change the world by Andrew Back, a look at how Wayland could change how graphics worked on Linux by Richard Hillesley and a look at Apple's decision to streamline how it developed and used the CUPS printing system for Linux, by Thorsten Leemhuis.

March

With an election due by the end of the year, the news that a US e-voting system was cracked in less than two days in a trial became big news as did Google's global switch to HTTPS by default, bumping up security for all. The fine Linux From Scratch was updated with latest guidance on how to build your own Linux system, the committee that had been directing the GNU C Library development disbanded and a Ruby on Rails problem was exposed during an embarrassing manipulation of GitHub repositories.

The Linux 3.3 kernel arrived and Thorsten Leemhuis did his traditional thorough examination of what was new. Thorsten also had something to say about the pace of development and deployment of the Btrfs filesystem while Andrew Back looked at how to use open source to build a GSM phone network.

April

Blue Systems emerged in April as the new sponsor of the KDE-based Kubuntu distribution and C emerged on top of the TIOBE popularity chart for languages. Oracle released a MySQL denial of service proof of concept by accident, a release candidate for the next GIMP showed off the graphics package's GPU enhancements and an open source robot went on sale.

The Lua language was the subject of the latest "Speed Guide" feature article by Dj Wallker-Morgan, Fabian Scherschel looked at the newly released Ubuntu 12.04 and Christopher von Eitzen rounded up the essential programs which will run across the major operating systems.